How to Develop a Distribution Strategy to Complement Your Content Plan

Distribution Strategy to Complement Your Content Plan 

Marketers input a lot of marketing efforts and spend fortunes to ace content marketing. However, great content is not worth it if the audience is unaware of its existence. Your content strategy revolves around a top-notch content distribution strategy This guide will teach you about the tools regarding the best content distribution strategy that can help perfectly distribute the created content so that your audience can easily consume it. Get a personalized content distribution strategy.

What is a Content Distribution Strategy? 

Content distribution strategy is a carefully curated procedure of sharing, posting and promoting your content. This is a strategic way to provide your content to the audience members so they can consume it through various media formats and channels. 

Content distribution statistics show Google answers almost 3.8 million search questions every minute. In this era of social media, most content distribution is executed through publishing, sharing and promoting content on social media platforms. These contents are curated for social media or are re-formatted for social media. The content distribution starts after creating the content while deciding upon how and where to publish it. 

Content Types for Distribution 

There are many different types of content; each type needs its own distribution plan.

1. ebooks: You can distribute ebook content through a form on a landing page. Some websites ask visitors to submit their personal information to get access to each ebook.
2. Podcasts and Interviews: Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts are  some of the content distribution strategy examples.
3. Videos: Your video content, which shares how-to videos, brand content and written content shared in video format, can be shared through Video or YouTube. 
4. Infographics: You can create infographic content and share that on Pinterest by creating an account which automatically shares the infographics. 
5. Case studies and success stories: You can distribute success stories and case studies via a dedicated page on the website. On this page, visitors can find case studies featuring your actual customers.
6. Webinars: You can distribute webinar content via a webinar page on your company website so that the page visitors can browse and get access to webinar content for free. 
7. Blogs: You can distribute your blog content through your own blog and send out a newsletter daily or weekly with the best recently broadcasted content. If your blog contains various properties such as Sales, Marketing, Website and Service, you can set up different homepages and newsletters for each of them.

How do You Develop an Effective Content Distribution Strategy? 

A content distribution strategy can boost your content impact past creation and curation. An effective content distribution strategy can set goal benchmarks and you can measure the content distribution performance against it. Only a proper content distribution strategy can help you achieve hard goals while promoting your content. 

Here is how to create a content distribution strategy. 

• Research target audience: Content distribution means getting your content in front of the target audience. You won’t be able to execute this unless you know where to find them and what their reading taste is. Thus, before strategising, research the target audience whom you want your content to consume. You can use Google Analytics or social media analytics tools to collect demographic data from your email subscribers, website visitors, customers and social media followers. Analyse your audience’s age, gender, location, income, education and other categories. You can then collect direct feedback from your email subscribers, customers and social media followers. 
• Audit your Content: You could have already published some content like social media content, blog posts, videos and more before strategising them. Instead of removing the content, you should audit them to understand if it is hurting or helping the distribution efforts. A thorough audit can be performed through three parts:

1. Logging the content: You can log your content manually or use a tool which can help you to crawl or collect the content, and list each title, URL and description in a single spreadsheet. 
2. Assessing the content impact: Some tools can help to list social shares, content length and backlinks. You can assess the impact of each piece of content and alter anything that is supposed to be rewritten, updated or erased.
3. Identifying content gaps: You can use gap tools that can identify gaps in the content and conduct keyword research to discover new keyword phrases that can help your content rank higher. 
    

• Choose content distribution channels: After deciding upon the target audience you can choose the forums like Quora or Reddit and promote your content there. You can also choose traditional PR or share on social media channels depending on the behaviour and preferences of your audience. 
• Decide on content types: Now choose the type of content you would like to create. Some companies publish all content on their specific blog and repurpose and re-publish them afterwards. Since almost 50% of buyers consider purchasing a product after reading a company’s blog, it is always recommended to build a business blog and expand them afterwards.
• Build an Editorial Calendar: Your editorial calendar can help your marketing team to stay aligned and execute plans to reach common goals. This is a roadmap to follow to continue working in the upcoming weeks and months. You can use a google sheet, google calendar, Coscedule, Trello, Asana etc. and include categories such as ‘Repurposing Plans’ and ‘Publish Destinations’. 
• Set content distribution KPIs: Your content distribution strategy needs to involve setting goals for KPIs and their following metrics.

• Create Your Content: Create content depending on your available team size, resources, brand and industry. You can use the AnswerthePublic tool to flesh out topics and analyse audience search preferences. Canva can help you create beautiful images and infographics.  
• Market and Distribute Your Content: Publish and market the content through your chosen distribution networking channels. Send emails or post on social media considering the best time for post engagement and share accordingly. 
• Measure and Analyse Your Results: After publishing the content keep an eye on Google Analytics, social media analytics and blog performance. Set a regular time (weekly, quarterly or monthly) to measure and analyse the performance and know if some numbers can be beaten the next week or month.

Conclusion: 

Content distribution strategy can change according to your content efforts and with the expansion of your team. You can choose content distribution tools like Medium, HubSpot, HARO, PR Newswire, ClickToTweet etc. to ease up the whole content distribution strategy. Develop the best content distribution strategy based on the content you want to distribute, your target audience and the distribution channels and boost your brand awareness, collect loyal followers and notice conversions. At Text Mercato, we know how to produce quality content that reaches and connects with your audience and converts them into reliable leads for your business. You may check out our content writing services to discover how we can provide your company with fresh material to boost your marketing strategy.